


Lunar Weight

by levendis



Series: Prompt Fics [101]
Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: M/M, Mildly Dubious Consent, Other, Recreational Drug Use, cuddlecore
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-17
Updated: 2017-01-17
Packaged: 2018-09-18 05:55:37
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,763
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9371081
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/levendis/pseuds/levendis
Summary: He's a boy, she's an ancient Gallifreyan space-time ship. Can I make it any more obvious?





	

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Nervous Circuits](https://archiveofourown.org/works/2581019) by [levendis](https://archiveofourown.org/users/levendis/pseuds/levendis). 



> for anon, who prompted: Basically I just want you to write a sequel to "Nervous Circuits."

The ship seems curious about Nardole, almost shy. He drops his purse on a control bank, looking around. Half-expecting to find a hand to shake.

“It’s bigger,” the Doctor is prompting.

The lights on the console shift from blue to pink to gold. An image is presented to Nardole: a man in a suit and a woman in also a suit, but with a skirt instead of trousers; they’re shaking hands. The image shifts: the woman is not a woman but instead an ill-defined peripheral-vision presence, something achingly beautiful about it. The man is now him. They are shaking hands.

“Hello,” he says, waving. “Pleasure to meet you.”

“…On the inside,” the Doctor finishes, evidently disappointed about something or other.

“Obviously,” Nardole says, circling around the console. “First thing I noticed. You’re not very observant, are you.”

 

* * *

Nardole has a bedroom here. Or, well, he has several bedrooms, since if this is a nearly-infinite space with nigh-endless permutations and possibilities, it’d be silly to settle down without exploring his options. There’s the one with a water slide, the one with a ball-pit. The chic modernist one, all chrome and birch; the cozy one with a fireplace and more leather armchairs than strictly necessary. The one with a large heart-shaped bed and a mirror on the ceiling and smooth jazz that sort of exists, sonically, rather than coming from anywhere. The closet is filled with velvet smoking jackets, in his size, which he’d be into if he didn’t feel like it veered too far into the Doctor’s sartorial territory.

(The ship whines a bit when he leaves that one. He pats the door, from the corridor side. “I know you like it,” he says. “Not quite my taste, though. Sorry.”)

He’s got bathrooms, as well. Swimming pools and saunas and elaborate marble landscapes where water just sort of exists without exactly coming from anywhere. One with heated floors and heated towels and a large bathtub and a camera in the corner near the ceiling that follows him, red light blinking hopefully.

“This is a private time,” Nardole says, enunciating carefully. He drops his toiletry kit beside the bathtub, which is also heated and already filled with water and a frothing, swirling blue foam. “So no, please.”

The camera droops, making a disappointed ‘vroop’ sort of noise, and the light fades out.

“And I’d like to choose my own bath bomb,” he says, stripping down. “We can decide together next time, if you’d like.”

 _Vroop?_ the bathroom asks, from everywhere and nowhere. Possibly from inside his own head.

“Vroop,” he affirms, settling down gingerly into the steaming-hot tub.

 

* * *

Nardole wakes up one morning, in one of his bedrooms, with a raging erection. Which is unexpected, since he’d been dreaming about writing a stern letter to the council in which he lived, in the dream, about their garbage pickup policies.

“Okay,” he says. He avoids thinking about his cock, which now feels like it’s approximately the size of the moon. It’s a good time to be sort of fat, he thinks; it’s alright in general but his belly makes a decent privacy curtain between him and his apparent arousal. A skinny bloke would have to look at all that downstairs nonsense.

(He tries not to wonder if this has ever happened to the Doctor, who - not that Nardole pays attention to this sort of thing - is a skinny bloke; a bit soft, in a nice ‘wouldn’t turn down a Jaffa cake if offered’ way, but scrawny on the whole - he does not wonder about that, since it is of course an inappropriate thought. Not that there’s anything objectively wrong with that sort of imagining, but their friendship has not quite progressed to the point where he feels comfortable entertaining the idea.)

The ship chirps at him. An image is presented: a businessman and a businesswoman are shaking hands. The businessman is him, naked, and the businesswoman is something incomprehensible, unfathomable. Instead of hands, there are genitals.

“Okay,” he says again. “Just - don’t watch, alright?” He closes his eyes, so as not to be a hypocrite more than he has to, and squeezes his hand beneath the elastic waistband of his pajama trousers.

 

* * *

After the business with the superb flying man and the evil brains and the apocalypse and things, Nardole finds A) himself quite worn out and B) a stuffed aardvark on the pillow on the bed in the bedroom he’s requisitioned for himself tonight. It’s adorable, and velvety-soft, and he immediately feels an odd emotional connection to it.

“You’re an excellent aardvark,” he says. He moves the aardvark’s head up and down in a nod. The aardvark knows it is excellent, and returns the compliment.

There’s a Toblerone on the pillow as well. He unwraps it and puts as much of it as will fit into his mouth, clutching the stuffed aardvark to his chest.

“Fanks,” he mumbles around the chocolate and nougat. A light in the corner of the room, near the ceiling, glows pink. Bashful, shy, almost.

 

* * *

“I was thinking to myself the other day -”

The Doctor snorts.

“-About how I quite like the tactile sensation of fur,” Nardole continues, unperturbed. “Not so much the ethics of non-synthetic fur, but the feeling of it is lovely. I’ve never understood why, for example, fur hats have the fur on the outside, and not the inside.”

“Something to do with insulation, I assume.”

“Right, but outside of serious arctic conditions? Anyway. That’s not the important part. It was an internal thought, see, I didn’t write it down or say it out loud or anything like that. So I was wondering…”

The Doctor twirls his index finger in a go-faster motion.

“Is the TARDIS psychic? And if so, have you considered teaching her the importance of consent vis a vis direct mental contact?”

He raises the part of his face where eyebrows would be, if he had those. The Doctor stares back at him blankly.

“Might be better to just show you.” Nardole heads back towards the nearest corridor, gesturing _c'mon_ when the Doctor forgets to follow.

He’s got the oddest impulse to grab the Doctor’s hand, when he finally catches up.

 

* * *

Nardole finds his latest and now semi-permanent bedroom where he absolutely did not leave it. He has not taken the Doctor’s hand, although he still vaguely wants to.

“Shoes,” he requests, slipping out of his flip-flops. “None, I mean. Or off, rather.”

The Doctor sighs heavily, and sits down on the floor to take his boots off. Which he would do, as a person, rather than simply bending over, since he generally doesn’t seem to have too firm a grasp on the conventions of human movement. Politely, Nardole averts his eyes, although he does openly and frankly admire the Doctor’s courgette-patterned socks once the deed is done.

“Here we go, then,” Nardole says, gently pushing the Doctor through the doorway.

“Um,” the Doctor says. “It’s.”

“It’s all gone fur,” Nardole supplies helpfully.

Which it has, thoroughly. The floor, the walls, the ceiling; the lamp; the television set, and the bookshelves. Covered, or potentially made entirely out of, a soft pearlescent-gray fur. His personal effects remain thankfully unaffected, nestled here and there in the gently-swaying, luxurious pelt of everything else.

“It’s not that I dislike it, I’m finding it quite enjoyable actually. Only it’s an invasion of privacy listening in on my internal monologue like that.”

The Doctor raps his knuckles on the wall, or attempts to, since it’s difficult to make any sort of commanding sound and/or gesture against a mass of fluff. “You won’t do that again,” he announces.

“Unless I say it’s okay,” Nardole amends.

“Unless Nardole says it’s okay.” He flexes his toes in the floor-fur, a slight but noticeable sort of pleasure-wriggle running up through him all the way to the eyebrows.

“It is nice, though,” Nardole stage-whispers. “Innit.”

“Mmm.”

“I’m planning on getting massively caned and lying on the floor for several hours while eating Wotsits,” Nardole says, still whispering, although he’s forgotten why exactly he thought it was important to be quiet and on the down-low. He clears his throat, resumes at a normal volume, although that now feels slightly too loud. “You’re more than welcome to join.”

 

* * *

“She likes you,” the Doctor mumbles. They’re holding hands now, curled up together on the floor. Some clothing has been lost along the way.

“Yes,” Nardole says. “Obviously.”

The Doctor, who’s apparently had the bristly-prickly thing clean smoked out of him, just wriggles in closer, his free hand weaving through the floor-fur and letting it drag through his fingers, over and over. “Can you feel it?”

Nardole pauses, considers. Distracted slightly by the niceness of the floor-fur against his bare back and the Doctor’s head-fur against his belly. He can, he can feel it: the warmth, a vibration. A love, and something altogether more prurient. Held back, though, now. Less of a direct genital-tugging than before.

Still a slight encouragement in that direction, though. An open invitation, an expression of interest. An image: the two of them, in this fur room. The ship with her proverbial arms around them. The image fades into a thumbs-up emoji.

“Both I and your sentient erotic time-space ship would like for us to be kissing now,” Nardole says thickly. That’s not entirely what he’d meant to say, but the phrasing of what came out of his mouth is apparently endlessly hilarious, so he giggles, and giggles harder as the Doctor pries himself up slowly, all eyebrows and askew hair and expression far too serious for the situation at hand.

“Okay,” the Doctor says. “Okay, okay.” And he kisses him. Slowly, softly, as he awkwardly maneuvers himself over Nardole. Like he doesn’t understand entirely how bodies work but he’s willing to wing it.

The ship kissing him, too. The floor caressing him, softening just enough. A cocoon, him between the two of them. All hands held, now.

The Doctor grins, would probably prefer to not have that particular noise classified as a giggle. The ship’s sighing below them, is wrapping around them. Nardole’s got one hand tangled in the floor-fur and one tangled in the Doctor’s hair, and the Doctor’s got one hand on where Nardole does not have hair, head-wise, and the other on his side where the ship meets his body.

“No filming,” Nardole specifies. The light in the corner of the room, by the ceiling, flickers and fades out, accompanied by a disappointed-sounding electronic whine.

(Another light comes on, in another corner; he hadn’t said anything about audio recording, after all.)


End file.
